Today, more photographs are taken than any time in history. With the advent of Smartphones, users have an increasingly capable camera platform which they carry with them everywhere they go. Photos are taken quickly and easily, and because Smartphones are connected to the internet via cellular or Wi-Fi technology, those images are shared with family and friends through a number of services. Images can be emailed, added to text messages, or shared via popular social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
While more images are being captured than ever, fewer are being printed. There are many reasons for this. While it is easy to share images with family and friends via the internet, it is not always easy, straightforward, or convenient to get the images off of your phone and printed.
Home printers are typically complex multipurpose devices. In order to satisfy the largest number of possible user needs, printers today are festooned with multiple interfaces (USB, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, etc.), and support a host of different standard protocols to maximize their compatibility with various applications. They are designed to use papers of various sizes and types, support one-sided or two-sided printing, and leverage multiple paper sources. In addition, there are many special software applications provided by printer manufacturers to enable a large variety of print applications. As a result of this, printers tend to be large complicated devices that stay one place in the home. They are difficult to setup and users tend to take advantage of only a small subset of their features. On top of this, the user must have a variety of consumables on hand to support different printing applications: different sizes and types of paper, collections of ink and toner cartridges, and so on.
Because of all of this complexity, many users just don't know how to print photos from their phones, or find the process so inconvenient, awkward or time consuming, that they seldom make the effort.
Another photographic concept that was common in the past was the idea of “instant printing”. This involved the use of cameras with special print film that was designed to self-develop in seconds, directly providing a print. Polaroid was famous for its line of cameras that produced instant prints. There was something special and fun about the ability to produce an instant print from a moment that was captured. While photography is often used to record life events, the immediate gratification of the instant print often became the stimuli and focus of a social event. Friends involved in taking pictures of themselves and instantly looking at the results create enjoyable and fun moments that help to drive and enhance social interactions. Such prints were often given to individuals at the gathering as a keepsake of their fun moments together. These were real and lasting tokens of social exchange, not virtual ones.
While many older users have grown up in a time where hardcopy prints of your images was a common experience, the younger generation has grown up in a world where such prints are increasingly rare. The concept of an “instant print” is even rarer still, and something that is just not part of their common experience.
Instead, imaging experiences are typically based upon softcopy images viewed on their computer or their Smartphone and shared with family and friends via a collection of communication vehicles and social media sites. This in itself has created new forms of rich social sharing. Images, and the comments associated with them, have become the new tokens of social exchange and a core aspect of modern social media. Users can share moments of their day with a network of friends and have them respond to their images, and even share images of their own. This mechanism acts to nurture relationships in a way that was not possible in the days before the internet, when the only way to share images was through hardcopy prints.
While Social Media sharing is a positive experience for many people, at the end of the day, this sharing is ephemeral. Images are shared and forgotten. Screen images last for mere moments and then are gone. Sharing happens often, but ultimately is a fuzzy and intangible experience that is sometimes drowned out by the sheer volume of images being shared within larger social networks.
While the value of softcopy images as part of the social networking experience is significant, such softcopy images are less useful when considering an actual gathering of friends in real life. While images certainly add a fun element to any group interaction, today this is not a convenient process. At best, a small image can be produced on a phone screen, and to be shared with the group, the phone must be passed around. Given the attachment people have with their cell phones, not to mention the personal and sensitive data that they likely hold, passing the phone around to a group is not always a comfortable experience. Imagine if it were possible to make instant prints from images on your phone? These prints could easily be passed around by a group, and copies could be given a way as keepsakes.